[09190]

Hello,
I have a weird issue and I've been searching without success for a solution.

I have installed XBMC on two macs. One mac has OS X 10.4 while the other has OS X 10.5 running.

Both macs access the same windows server 2003 machine to read media.

The shared drive on the windows server 2003 machine are accessible, can be read from, and streamed from, while in finder. I mean I can access the drives and play the AVI files with VLC form both machines without a problem.

Now the funky part:

the mac with 10.5 and xbmc, can access these files, read them and play them in file view in xbmc. The shared drive is available in Volumes and the files inside the volume are visible.

the mac with 10.4 and xbmc, the shared drive is visible in xbmc in volumes. however when I open the volume, the file list is empty. As if the drive had nothing on it or as if xbmc could not see anything in the drive.

I do not know if this is caused by some broken settings from one xbmc install to another or if it due to the os x difference.

Any help would be great. Thanks

[davilla]

I would compare the xbmc.log between the two systems and see what is different.

[09190]

Hello, sorry to be such a newb, I'm rather new to OS X. I cannot find xbmc.log. it isnot under library/logs or anywhere under library/application support/xbmc. A search with xbmc.log does not bring up any files.

I've enabled debug logging in system prefs but that does not seem to produce any results in creating such a file.

EDIT: forgot to mention I looked in /var/tmp via go to folder and did not see anything in there.

[09190]

Update:
I found the xbmc.log by using the console logs, seems I cannot see them in finder.

The log files are rather long, and seem to have quite a different content from each other depending on what I have done in XBMC. Should I post both of them up via pastebin.com?

[davilla]

The typical method to reduce the size of xbmc.log is to remember that it will be created fresh on launch of XBMC. Now do the operation that will result in the issue, then quit. That way xbmc.log only contains operations that might show the problem.

The log file is in your user library folder so for example mine is at

/Users/davilla/Library/Logs/xbmc.log

[09190]

Thanks for the tip.

I've gotten the log files to considerably shorter versions just by launching XBMC, going into videos and opening the volumes selected. I can post the two different log files. There does not seem to be any error regarding not being able to open the volume. I can post these log files if needed.

One thing I should note. I have two mounted volumes. Lets call them Volume1 and Volume2. Both are accessible from finder on both macs. Both show up in XBMC in volumes.

Volume1 appears to have no content in XBMC on the mac with OSX 10.4 while Volume2 show up ok, with all its contents displayed.

Both volumes and their content appear ok on the XBMC on the mac with OSX 10.5.

On the comp with the problem, the Volume1 appearss empty in videos, photos, music, file manager, everywhere.

Now if I go to add sources and I add an SMB source, navigate to the server in the workgroup, log in with username and pass, select the drive which is Volume1, XBMC reads and accesses the previously invisible file list.

So I was able to circumvent my inability to acces this shared drive by adding the original drive as an SMB share, however it is very weird that the volume appears empty in regular file view.

Maybe something to do with the size of the drive? Mixed content? Number of files? Something is causing the volume to appear empty for some reason.

[davilla]

Maybe something to do with the size of the drive? Mixed content? Number of files? Something is causing the volume to appear empty for some reason.

not a clue until you pastebin the xbmc.log files.

But you post did give more important info, that being the problem occurs when you have the SMB volumes mounted as a local volume with respect to XBMC and using the internal SMB client in XBMC, then contents are displayed.

Do you have any funny characters or symbols in the names? How about hidden files, any hidden files present on one volume that are not present on the other.

The fact that you have two volumes, one that works, one that does not, on the 10.4 system is good. Now it distills down to what is different between the two volumes.

[09190]

Well, i finally got the Volume to mount properly in XBMC. Took a while and some trial and error to sift through the files.

It does not seem to be a file name/international character in file tittle issue.

I think it has to do with hidden files as you said. I had to show all hidden files, system files, on the server, remove a bunch of .DS_Store files and a hidden folder, then unmount the volume by eject in Finder and remount the volume in finder. Finally the volume mounts correctly in XBMC.

I don't know if this is a worthwhile bug (if it even is a bug) with 10.4 and xbmc, but if you wish I could send you the filenames (even files themselves) of the reoved hidden files that got the volume to mount properly.

This does only seem to effect accesing the drive through volumes but is unaffected in SMB sharing method.